Question

Because ecological disruption can put native species in contact with humans and livestock, it is believed that an increased number of threatened species in an area leads to a greater risk of novel disease transmission. A team of ecologists is investigating this relationship and records the number of threatened species and the number of novel diseases in different biogeographical regions. The following is their data set:

Region	Number of threatened species	Number of novel diseases
1	12	20
2	10	12
3	6	4
4	5	7
5	3	6
Mean	7.2	9.8
SD	3.7	6.4

(a) Calculate the correlation between these two variables.

(b) What are the slope and intercept for a linear regression model with number of diseases as the response variable?

(c) Predict how many diseases we would expect for a region that has 10 threatened species.

(d) Can we conclude from this data that ecological disruption causes an increase in the transmission of novel diseases? Explain.

Answer 1